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AnvilNext Engine Allowed ACIII To Run On Current Consoles

Assassin's Creed III was a super ambitious project, and one that almost didn't make it to current consoles.

Ubisoft technical director Marc-Antoine Lussier told T3 that getting ACIII on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 was "almost a miracle." The problem was that they had this grand vision and yet, the same two pieces of hardware on the market.

In order to achieve their goals, they needed to create the revolutionary AnvilNext engine from scratch, which has allowed the team to develop a bigger, more vibrant environment. Said Lussier:

"If you remember in Assassins' Creed we were very lucky that the streets were narrow and we didn’t have such long line of sight and you couldn’t necessarily see the characters on the street; New York is a totally different story.

We can have a couple thousand NPCs that you see in the distance and as you get closer as you move into New York or Boston, we dynamically switch from low detail NPC to full detail NPC...so you have the illusion of being surrounded by a gigantic crowd."

There are plenty of reasons to be excited about Assassin's Creed III, and that AnvilNext engine is definitely one of those reasons. Just about everything we've seen thus far has proven its worth, and showed what a great new piece of tech can do. ...wonder if Activision is listening.

Incredible information, similar to what CCP have had to do for "Dust514" on the Ps3 exclusively.

What "Assasin's Creed III" proves again is that the hardware can do miracles if coded properly for it. A chip is a chip, it has a maximum throughput, and when married together with high bandwidth components much data can be processed, streamed and pushed through in real-time.

What we are seeing is optimisation across a parallel processing system, that when pushed, can render incredible results; as we will see now in the forthcoming games. What it shows is that a well crafted game can impress, even if you can't run natively in 1080p. Who needs it if the lighting, environments and texture fedility is good, and you can stream in these components as you need on the fly.

Optimising the engine and streaming tech is where it is at, and like we will see with "Beyond" and "The Last Of Us", much can be achieved just by approaching a project the right way, both technically and artistically.

Gotta hand it to 360 devs can still optimize and squeeze more power from aging tech =)That's what this means, right?So basically AC3 couldn't have been done if there wasn't room to get more out of 2005's time bomb of a game machine =pLast edited by Temjin001 on 10/18/2012 12:25:16 AM

Indeed it is what it means. It goes to show that you can keep optimizing the software for *any* computer and thus make it perform a little bit better almost forever. It's more up to the developers than the hardware.

the scale is certainly amazing, they were showing off a new level at the EB expo a massive battle and apparently its only "medium size".god dam if that is medium size, i cant wait to see what they call oh my god this is freaking huge!the added animation is amazing too, just the way conor reacts to being hit, the way his body moves climbing trees and such.previous AC games you have been like a statue climbing buildings, this really is amazing how much added animation detail there is!looks oh so freaking awesome!

Anyone see the ACIII: Liberation trailer earlier today? Looks SICK. I pre-ordered the ACIII Vita bundle, and I'm getting REALLY excited. Never played an AC game before and now I'm getting TWO on one day.